‘Mary?’ My voice was swallowed in the hush. I stepped in and pressed my palm to the wall. A tinny sound came up from the floor and I looked down. The red engine lay on its side, one wheel in a slow spin. I drew back, the breath of the room on my mouth. The corners were steeped in shadow and there was such a stillness that I knew I could only be alone.

For a second, the world seemed to turn my senses – what I heard, saw and felt did not match what was possible. The room was empty and yet, not moments before, the noise of the engine being pushed across the floorboards had filtered down to me. I backed out, scrabbling for explanations where I could not find them. My thoughts caught on that moment on the beach and the figures shadowed on the sand beside Mary and how she talked so earnestly to the air.

I was being ridiculous. Ghosts did not exist. The dead did not walk. If they did, would not Clara have come to me? Had I not begged for one last glimpse, a glimpse that would have shown me that, wherever she was, she was happy? No, bodies rotted down and the only claim to life they had was in the memories of those who lived on. My heart gave an uneasy twist. Perhaps it was my own steps upon the boards that had sent the engine rocking, and the sound that I had heard before, some strange effect of the wind. And as I took the stairs back down, I iterated it again. Ghosts did not – could not – exist.

I began to spend as much time as was possible out of doors. Away from Iskar, some of those feelings of anxiety were somehow temporarily relieved. Our hair would come loose in the wind and our skirts grow sandy.

Sometimes we just walked, in a silence that was never uncomfortable. The growing trust and affection needed no words, and slowly Clara and my father moved to a place that I could occasionally visit without such acute misery. And yet, behind all that, the sense of something astray sat across my chest and I was aware of a growing discomfort. ‘All is not well,’ Ailsa had whispered weeks before, and I wondered if some answers might lie with her.

A few days later the opportunity presented itself and I found myself on the path to Ailsa’s house.

I knocked and she was so soon at the door that I wondered if she had watched my approach. We went in through the kitchen, where the ceiling was hung with dried fish, game and herbs. A sharp, astringent smell was in the air, like nettle. She did not offer me tea or a seat but went straight to work stoking the stove, then pounding oats in a stone bowl. I stood awkwardly, playing with my coat.